Leadership Forum on Organizations and Sustainability: Taking Stock

OAEXXX10.1177/1086026621992147Organization & EnvironmentHoward-Grenville et al. 992147other2021 Leadership Forum Organization & Environment 2021, Vol. 34(1) 3 –17 Leadership Forum on Organizations © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: and Sustainability: Taking Stock, sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026621992147DOI: 10.1177/1086026621992147 Looking Forward journals.sagepub.com/home/oae Tobias Hahn, Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Thomas Lyon, Michael V. Russo, and Judith L. Walls In mid-2020, leaders in the field of organizations and the natural environment convened for a conference call to assess the field as it stands and consider reorientations that might elevate its scholarship and amplify its impact. On the call were: •• Tobias Hahn (ESADE), President of GRONEN, the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment1 •• Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge), Deputy Editor of Academy of Management Journal. •• Tom Lyon (University of Michigan), President of ARCS, the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability •• Mike Russo (University of Oregon), Editor-in-Chief of Organization & Environment •• Judith L. Walls (Institute for Economy and the Environment, University of St.Gallen), Chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management1 What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our free-flowing conversation, with references that came up in the discussion added.2 Mike Russo: Let’s begin by talking about what people have sometimes derided as a field- wide fetish with theory. Why do you think we have this absolute necessity to develop theory and dwell on it so heavily? Tom Lyon: Because we’re about 40 years behind economics (laughter). I’m not totally joking here, either. In 1982, economics Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief wrote a paper called “Academic Economics” in the journal Science (Leontief, 1982), which bemoaned the fact that articles on “the finer points of economic theory occupy a more and more prominent place than ever before” and that over 2/3 of the articles in the flagship economics journal, the American Economic Review, were purely theoretical in nature. A decade earlier, Leontief worried, in his Presidential address to the American Economic Association, that “The weak and all too slowly growing empirical foundation clearly cannot support the proliferating superstructure of pure, or should I say, speculative economic theory” (Leontief, 1971). Since that time, of course, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and by 2011 only 19% of the articles in the top three economics journals were purely theoretical (Hamermesh, 2013). In management, we currently have so much theory and so little empirical evidence to back all of it up that I think it’s necessary to go through a period of empirical testing. Then, as you start to find anomalies, and realize you have a need for new theory, the pendulum will swing back. 4 Organization & Environment 34(1) Mike Russo: Do you think the issue is that we use too many different theories to develop the requisite depth in a narrower set of the most promising ones, or have we stuck with those that are less promising and need to jettison those in favor of more promising ones? Tobias Hahn: Do we really use so many different theories? I remember a piece by Martina Linnenluecke and Andrew Griffiths (2013). They did a review on sustainability and found that there are two or three dominant theories, basically the resource-based view and institutional theory, and maybe some psychological theories. But that’s basically it. I would think we are obsessed with a handful of theories, and sometimes it’s theory for the sake of doing theory, and that is the problem. Looking at Jen’s talk at EGOS and the sub- sequent essay (Howard-Grenville, in press) she published in Organization Theory, it’s very clear that probably we look at the wrong theories. We should look at systems theory and ecological theories. Then again, not as doing theory for the sake of theory and for bringing in yet another new theory but as an inspiration for asking the right questions and then going to the field and doing the empirical work. Jen Howard-Grenville: I agree with all that’s been said, and I find it fascinating that economists are ahead of us with this, because our field was basically derived from people moving into new things called business schools, but coming from diverse disciplines, like economics, sociology, and psychology. And as a result of needing to legitimize business schools as credible academic entities as they arose in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an effort to cre- ate journals and do “real science” with an emphasis on developing theory. Jerry Davis (2010) has this wonderful phrase where he talks about the 1950s and 1960s as being the “Cambrian explosion of creativity” for organizational scholars during which the theories we all still use were developed. As Tobias says, we still use dependency theory, institutional theory, and the beauty of some of these theories is that they continually rein- vent themselves. I would say actually, honestly, when you look at our field, most of the theory that we have is theory that we started with. The newly relevant theory, like that on paradox and systems is more nuanced and is, I think, being imported from and inspired by other fields. The good news is we were multidisci- plinary and hence we can adapt and adopt new theories that are useful to explaining con- temporary phenomenon. The bad news is, we’ve been trained and socialized to develop theory and so have sort of created the conditions we are now struggling with. But like economists, we’ve also had leading voices calling for a shift away from theory for theory’s sake for a long time (Ghoshal, 2005; Rynes, 2007). The fact remains that, frankly, for a lot of the topics we study, it’s unclear that there could be a definitive empirical contribution, and this is probably the case in economics, too. We don’t study things that are subject to universal laws. We’re studying humans; we’re studying how they make sense of things; we’re studying the decisions that they take under uncertainty. So, our empirical findings—and our theorizing—will always reflect the conditions under which they arose and have boundaries on their applicability. I was just revisiting Jerry Davis’ (2010) paper this morning on why theories don’t progress. As he points out, part of it is due to a complete lack of experimental control in the world of organizations. So, we need to give up even thinking about empirical and theoretical contri- butions on the model of other fields where experimental control and a cumulative evidence base are the gold standards. Davis also says humans and the organizations they are a part of are continuously responding to and seeking novelty. So even if we describe really, really well what they have been doing, that doesn’t mean it predicts what they will do. I think we, as journal editors or leaders in the field, need to be really bold about moving away from perpetuating the sense that the only contribution anyone can make is through theory, because increasingly this is giving us less bold and less relevant ideas to share with the world of business. Howard-Grenville et al. 5 Judith Walls: I agree, and I would maybe even push it a bit further in that, at least in my opinion, the need or the reason to theorize has always been to explain in somewhat simple terms the complex world. I actually feel that within the subfield of sustainability, we haven’t really developed significantly new theory beyond what business or management has already done with pulling the three disciplines together. We’ve perhaps extended theories, as can be seen in Stu Hart’s (1995) natural resource-based view which builds on the resource-based view but contains new concepts like shared vision and not just competitive advantage. Or similarly, Pete Tashman’s (2020) recent work on the natural resource dependence perspective that builds on resource dependence theory to bring in firms’ reliance on natural systems. On the one hand, there could be an opportunity here in terms of the connecting to the natural environment which is quite complex, and we need to look at things like systems theory such as socio-ecological systems or multilevel theories. On the other hand, I wonder if hav- ing more theory really helps us on a pragmatic level. To some extent, the (over-)emphasis on theory is a bit of a luxury perhaps because we view theory building as a status symbol against which scholars can measure themselves. Scholarly work is set apart from practitio- ner work in that we take the time to study something deeply, and in order to understand our insights, we theorize. This, of course, is valuable in and of itself (Van de Ven, 1989). But if that theory is disconnected from practice, then what are we really contributing? That’s not to say that theory isn’t useful, but I think this is all something we should ask our- selves. Sometimes, when I talk about atheoretical work or phenomenon-driven work, the response that comes back is, “Well, nothing is better than a good theory.” And yes, we may want to be able to theorize and generalize in order to gain insight. However, I’m agnostic as to whether we have theory or not. For me, theorizing is trying to explain upfront and then testing after the fact, whereas phenomenon-driven work does the opposite. In phenomenon-drive work, we look at the factual patterns, and then we try to explain something for which we typically don’t have a (good) theory (Hambrick, 2007).

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